a b c Hattenstone, Simon (1 July 2000). "A sad hurrah (part 2)". The Guardian . Retrieved 18 April 2018. It is hard to know how the contemporary audience will receive a stage work where so much of the effect hinges on being genuinely terrified by simulated rape, or theatrical cannibalism. The 1990s were, in some ways, a simpler and more naïve time. By the time 4.48 Psychosis went on stage at the Royal Court theatre in London, Kane would be dead. In February 1999, she killed herself at King’s College hospital, south London, three days after a previous suicide attempt. The play itself seemed to foreshadow events with uncanny accuracy. A sequence of elliptical fragments, fractured and emotionally lacerating, it apparently portrayed a mind in the throes of breakdown, raging against doctors who do not (or will not) understand. Not for the first time, the critics were disturbed. Was this even a play? “How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note?” the Guardian’s Michael Billington asked. In the next scene, Tinker beats Carl, wanting him to admit that he and Rod are romantically involved. He sodomizes Carl with a long pole, threatening to shove it through his body entirely. Carl gives up Rod's name and apologizes to Rod for it. Tinker then cuts out Carl's tongue and makes him swallow Rod's ring.

Kane in Stephenson and Langridge, 1997:133). Stephenson, H AND Langridge, N. (1997) Rage and Reason: Women Playrights on Playwriting. Bloomsburgh, London. Bond, Edward (2014). The Hidden Plot. Bloomsbury. p.174. ISBN 9781408171417 . Retrieved 19 September 2021. Dromgoole, Dominic (2002). The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting (2002ed.). Great Britain: Methuen. pp.163–165. ISBN 0-413-77134-2. a b c d Kane, Sarah (3 November 1998). "Sarah Kane Interview" (Interview: Audio). Interviewed by Dan Rebellato. Royal Holloway University . Retrieved 20 February 2021. Joshua Pharo’s lighting is filled with shadows and silhouettes to create a brooding intensity and there are switches between light and dark as the characters try to find a way out of their despair. The script echoes everything from the Bible (“Glory be to the father”) to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (“Hurry up please it’s time”) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“To die, to sleep”).

Best Sarah Kane Plays

Paulson, Michael (2 April 2015). "Robert Askins Brings 'Hand to God' to Broadway". The New York Times . Retrieved 16 November 2021. Sarah Kane's friend and fellow playwright, David Greig, wrote about the play's stage directions in his introduction to Sarah Kane: Complete Plays:

Actor Daniel Evans said that Kane "learnt the lines and went on with almost no rehearsal – and she blew us all away. She was fearless and connected. The performance required her to dance, to fly, to remove all her clothes – and she did it without blinking." [23] He also said "She was brilliant – extraordinary and above all raw. I always said that she made us look like actors, because she was so raw. She wasn't acting in the accepted sense of that term and any acting next door to that just seems like huge acting." [24] Evans has also stated that "I consider that one of the great privileges of my life having acted alongside her as well as being in her plays." [25]

Why You Should Read Sarah Kane

More than two decades on, it has lost none of its lyricism and dramatic intensity. Kane left almost no stage directions to denote gender, time or place, and because of this deliberate vagueness, the play becomes fertile ground for invention. Marg Horwell’s normcore set (very similar to her work on Revolt, She said. Revolt Again in 2017) is a box of grey hotelness, later explodes to reveal the walls and utilities of the Malthouse building. The actors are exceptional, but none draw attention to themselves at the expense of the ensemble. The production takes a while to find its rhythm, but once Fayssal Bazzi’s Soldier enters and the war gets going, it grips and holds us breathless until the very last words of the play. It is the work of a director who has come into her full powers and has nothing left to prove.

First original language production of the play in Austria, produced by Mental Eclipse Theater House in cooperation with Vienna theatre project. [12] [13] Critical reception [ edit ] Playwright Robert Askins, who received a 2015 Tony Award nomination for Best Play for Hand to God, has cited Kane as a major inspiration. [46] The creative team decided to invite groups of actors to read through the text, to plot out how many voices were needed, who might speak where. Macdonald eventually settled on a cast of three: Daniel Evans, who had worked with Kane on Cleansed, and fellow actors Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter. McInnes, who now works as a director, admits that at first she wasn’t sure: “I remember reading it on the train home, I couldn’t get a handle on it. But it got to me. By the lunchtime, I said to James, ‘I’ve got to be in this.’” In the early hours of 17 February 1999, Kane in her Brixton flat attempted suicide by taking 50 sleeping pills and over 150 antidepressant tablets. [10] Her flatmate, David Gibson, awoke and found a suicide note from her, stating that he was not to enter her room. Ignoring this request, Gibson entered Kane's room where he found her to be unconscious. [11]

Quotes

Kane herself and scholars of her work, such as Graham Saunders, have identified some of her inspirations as expressionist theatre and Jacobean tragedy. [1] The critic Aleks Sierz saw her work as part of a confrontational style and sensibility of drama termed " in-yer-face theatre". Sierz originally called Kane "the quintessential in-yer-face writer of the [1990s]" [2] but later remarked in 2009 that although he initially "thought she was very typical of the new writing of the middle 1990s. The further we get away from that in time, the more un-typical she seems to be". [3] The collapse of contexts and genres that marks the play (and that so infuriated the critics) is a gesture that would later repeat in Michael Haneke’s films (particularly Hidden), as well as in Lars von Trier’s: by the 2000s, the slip from middle-class banality to splatter horror would become common. It would also become more legible, as an expression of anxiety: that the prosperous peace here and the civic collapse there are somehow linked, perhaps even causally. PDF of Scorched Earth: Sarah Kane's Goodbyes written by Dan Rebellato and published in the programme for the 2016 National Theatre production of Cleansed